Sunday, 8 June 2014

Monongah
Mine ExplosionI
want to go up to Monongah where they had
that big explosion up there. You know, Monongah
Mine on Route 19. See, that’s where
three hundred and seven men got killed.
They don’t even know how many boys,
because they wasn’t on the payroll.
Bumping
Coal off the StoneThis
here is what they call bumping coal off
the stone [refers to photo]. You
had to undermine this about four feet deep -- you
know, get it in there about four feet deep.
You see when they get that undermine, then
someone would drill a hole there for the
coal. You
lived in a coal camp. If you had a boy that
was big enough where he could carry a dinner
bucket and it wouldn’t drag the ground,
then he was big enough to go in the mines.
This is a boy here.Hand
Auger After
they get this cut around here, this boy
would drill a hole with this hand auger
here for when they get ready to tap it.
A hand auger like this, see, you had to
have. You use to get up on the bench and
drill down. If you go in deeper, you can
move your bench up see. But then they’d
each tap that up, then they’d shoot
it, they'd shoot the coal. Tamping the Hole[Now
for the tamping, what would they actually
put in the hole?] One
was dynamite and clay. They use to put clay
at the mouth of your place where you would
work. You got clay and wrapped it up in
paper and you stuck it in a hole and you
would tap it in there, see. See I don’t
have none of that. Paulette Shine from that
museum, the Coal Museum, we’ve got
all that down there. Shooting
the Coal[Shooting
the coal means what?] They’d
hook a cable to it and years back they use
to call what they have a fuse. They’d
light the fuse, then run. Run away, and
it would go off. Nowadays they have a cap,
what they call a cap. They stick in a stick
of dynamite with about a seven foot cord
on it, and you’d put it in there and
then you’d get your cable and you’d
tie it on to this cord. Then you’d
stretch it out for about a hundred feet
until you’d get around a corner. Then
you'd have a little battery. You’d
put it on there, and just, you know, pull
the wire, and it would go off. Just charge
it up and set it off. See here, now they
shot the coal down and here’s where
they’re loading it in the car -- putting
it in there and hand loading it with a shovel.
ShovelsYou
see they’d have a shovel. They had
what they called a number three shovel.
Number three shovel is the size down here.
And number four shovel was a little bit
bigger, number five shovel was bigger yet.
You had guys working in mines called steam
shovels. We’d call them steam shovel
because they could load like a steam shovel.
See, they’d load this car up after
this coal was shot down; they’d load
the car. Dog
HolesI
don’t know if you know where Scott’s
Run is or not? Granville right down here?
Go past and there was sixty nine mines,
sixty-nine mines from here to Granville
to up at Cassville. Nineteen of them these
mines and the rest of them were called dog
holes. Go in there with [? ]and shoot the coal
out and sell it.

Nobody
had to pay for them. Like you wanted to
start a place like that? Well you started
with crops out along the river. You’d
go up and clean the dirt away and you could
start undermining the coal, shoot it and
load it up. Yeah, they use to be a lot of
dog holes.Cutting
MachineThen
they got a machine -- what they call a cutting
machine. Cut coal on the bottom you know.
Cut about seven feet deep. They had anywhere
from twelve to fourteen feet wide.

Then you didn’t have to undermine it or
nothing. You would just clean it, you’d
clean that dust from underneath that coal
out, where the cut coal was underneath.
Clean all that dust out, then you’d
shoot it.

Each
cut of coal sold about eight cars. That’s
about twenty to twenty-two tons of coal.
Then you’d clean that some places.
You had a cleanup, a cleanup system. You
have to clean that whole cut of coal up,
regardless of what kind of condition and
whether they had a wreck or something and
something leaked. Relay
MotorThey
had what they called a relay motor. They’d
bring end pieces in and put it in the side
track and then the horse would get it and
bring it to your work place. Steel
HoppersCassvile Mine use to load a hundred steel
hoppers a day. That's hand loading. That’s
how big it was. Steel
hoppers were what you loaded the coal into,
what you see on the road now. They had fifty
ton cars and seventy-five ton cars. Cassville
was a big coal company. It was owned by
some company in Pittsburgh. But we had a
coal mine here had a tipple on the other
side of the river.[What’s
a tipple?]Well,
see on this hill side? In here they had
a mine and a real tipple and they’d
load the coal in a bucket and transfer across
the river occasionally. That’s where
Star City comes in. But then when a cable
broke, that would change the mine. Mine
TimbersSee,
timbers like that [in a picture] was your
warning. If the place was getting bad, going
to fall in, them timbers would crack. They
would crack and that’s how you got
your warning. Then as more weight come down,
them posts would just bend and break and
fall. TimberingWell,
[to timber something] you had a saw and
an ax. You’d measure, you’d have
a little piece of stick, two pieces of stick
and slide you know and you made the lintel,
then you’d cut that post there and
let it leave enough space for that cap piece
up there you see. You made it sometimes
on what from was left over from the posts.
Split the post to make the cap pieces. See
here’s where they are doing more timbering,
that’s where the place probably got
real bad. Once
them posts took weight, you knew it. You
could feel the difference. You could tell
the difference when you’d come into
work the next morning you could tell the
difference by looking at the posts.Now
some company’s had what they called
timber men. They work separate. You had
a real bad place, they’d come in and
timber it out.Coal
LoaderSee
these guys, you see a coal loader. He didn’t
make no money unless he
loaded coal. What coal you load, that’s
what you got paid for. The
coal loader all he would do is load coal
and stuff like that. That’s what it
looks like here. Carbide LightsI
started in the mines in the thirties, but
this photo was way before the thirties [refers
to photo]. See, the miner has a carbide
light on. You bought carbide to put in the
bottom of the lamp. And the top of the lamp
had a little place where you would put water.
Then when you want a bigger flame, you’d
just flip that water on it and it give you
more steam and that flame would come out,
see. If was down at the museum, I could
show you a carbide light. Testing
for Bad ConditionsSee here’s this guy is testing for bad
coal. You know you could tell if you heard
somebody talking or by the sound of it.
If it sounded solid it was all right, but
if it boom or something to it, we knew it
was bad. We had a regular tapping signal.
A lot of times, your carbide light would tell
you if you had air in a mine or not. It
would go dim. It wouldn’t go out. If
you didn’t have enough ventilation
up in your work place that flame wouldn’t
get big at all, then you’d go out there
in the fresh air and pop up.I
mean this picture was taken back in the
twenties when they tested for gas with canaries.
Horses
in the MinesSee
I can remember the horses working in the
mines. A lot of the times, they’d break
a new horse in, I had to go up there and
coax the horse. They’d pull a car up
and when they was coming back down they
didn’t know where to turn off at and
I had hell of a time trying to get it to
turn off. After all they learned, they were
smarter than what the men was driving. Children
in the MinesA
lot of them kids wasn’t over twelve
years old. They had them on the tipple picking
slate. That was bindering the coal, separating
the coal.You
see this little boy that what I was telling
you about a while ago wasn’t big enough
to carry a bucket. There he is right there.
There’s his horse. See, probably that’s
a family. They went in there and loaded
the coal and pulled it out and dumped it
and car [?] back in there. There was a lot of
them in the mines around here. Factory
TrainSee
I can remember when they had a factory train
coming through Osage any time of the day.
It came from Pennsylvania to Jimtown, then
from Jimtown they could catch a train anywhere.
East or West, North or South anywhere they
wanted to go. They could catch a train.The
only transportation you had was you had
to walk from here to Jimtown, hit the train,
go to Morgantown, catch the train coming
back. They run about every hour or so. Then
there was a lot of car hopping too because
that freight train ran all the time up in
the hollow and Jimtown. I would jump on
it and take a ride to Jimtown and wait and
ride it back.Coal
Camp[You
grew up in Coal Camp. What was that like?
] Well,
a lot different than what it is today because
everybody knew everybody and if something
went wrong in the camp, everybody was there
to help you. I can remember when somebody
had a baby or something, everybody come
up there with chicken. People were more
friendly, you know what I mean? They were
closer together.Coal
camp is like a big city. It’s got everything
coal.A Burnside stove is a favorite. You’d
put that in one room and it would heat the
whole house. About four room houses about
all they had. Coal stove, yeah. You lived
in the coal camp they had a team of washers
and a wagon and a guy with all that. If
we needed coal, he would go get it and bring
it up to your house. Wouldn’t charge
a penny for it. I can remember them days
real good. You ever see that picture in
that museum down there about Liberty? If
you ever go down, look at that picture.
Liberty’s a little town down there.
Busting and Yellow DogsWhen
they started breaking the union, see they
throwed the people they call scabs -- we
call them scabs -- they took their furniture
and throwed it out. And them people, their
streets was all full of furniture. [The
companies] owned everything. Now
I can remember up here at Osage in Chaplin.
Osage had a coal mine there, and Chaplin
did on the side of the road. That’s
all the water there was. You couldn’t
even tell when it was dark here because
they had so damn many floodlights shining
back and forth, you couldn’t even tell
when it was dark. And nobody, let’s
see they had a lot of guards. But the trouble
didn’t start till they started fooling
around with [company guards]. And then that’s
when the trouble started, that’s when
the trouble started. It was knowed all over
the place. It was knowed all over the country.
We
use to call [the company guards] yellow dogs. They carried guns and they thought
they owned everything. They found out different.
Them
old union men that we had are now gone.
Yeah they’re all dead. I’m the
only one around here. I’m the only
one around here knows this stuff. And I
try to tell them.Shifts[They
ran] three shifts. One day shift, afternoon
and night. See here, this is Uncle Lloyd
right there [refers to photo]. That’s
me when I was a kid. All these people are
dead here. All of them. Let’s see.
This guy lives up in Granville. All these
guys here I was raised with in Granville.
They’re all gone Second shift. 1940
picture was taken. It shows up good don’t
it? Most of them was from around here, not
too far. Around Granville, well Granville
that’s where the tipple was at. Star
City, Evansdale, Brier Hill, just right
around here. This
here’s beginning of a shift there everybody’s
waiting to go in. You know in them days
you had to walk every place. There’s
no trips, no nothing. Then in 1945 or something
they started bringing loading machines. There use to be a mine here called Hell
Creek brought them in earlier than that.
That’s when we were working seven hours
a day then, too.After
a shift when we got ready to come home,
they’d side-track us or something to
bring a load of coal out. That’s when
we struck. We got paid for the time we went
in till the time we went out. No trouble
getting you in there, but getting you out.River
Ferry from Star City and Brier HillI
can remember a lot of people here worked
there from Star City and Brier Hill. They
went together and bought themselves a room
so they wouldn’t have to pay a nickel
to ride the ferry. That ferry, they had
a ferry down there you know. High water,
low water or not, they’d do it. They’d
load that boat on high water up the river
a long ways then they’d start across
by the time they’d got across they’d
be close to the tipple. Just
think. There was everything floating in
that river when it was high. Logs, trees
and everything. And the river wasn’t
very deep then because they didn’t
have the locks. The only locks they had
was up here. Cause in 1932 I can remember
whenever it went dry.Seasonal
Work We’d
set down there on the company store on the
porch down there, and then
that girl would call us up whether or not
we worked tomorrow. If she said there was
no work, we’d take off and go off somewheres.
Sat around all damn day just to hear whether
we worked or not.

Interview with former Scott's Run miner Lewis Loretta by Kirk Hazen, in Scott's Run Voices, from Scott's Run Writing Heritage Project,West Virginia History, Volume 53, 1994

Mexican miner and child, Bertha Hill, Scott's Run, West Virginia.
Many Mexicans and Negroes were brought into Scott's Run around 1926
to break the strike. Now about one-fourth of all mines employ any at all
of these, only very small percent and "only the cream". They are
generally accepted by other folks and there is a good deal of mixing and
intermarrying:
photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Former coal miner, worked twelve years for Chaplin Coal Company as
hand coal loader. He and several others complained to company about
conditions not being up to NRA (National Recovery Administration)
standards. All lost jobs. He's now on WPA (Works Progress
Administration) at thirty-eight dollars and twenty-five cents per month.
Scott's Run, West Virginia:
photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Old man, Hungarian, with cane, going home after work along tracks, Pursglove, Scott's Run, West Virginia:
photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Even the cow goes home along the tracks, the main thoroughfare. Scott's Run, West Virginia:
photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Even the cow goes home along the tracks, the main thoroughfare. Scott's Run, West Virginia:
photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

Coal miner’s child taking home kerosene for lamps. Company houses and
a coal tipple are in the background in Scott's Run, near Morgantown:
photo by Marion Post Wolcott, September 1938 (Farm Security Administration Collection, Library of Congress)

WaterBut
during those times it was you know and we
had to carry water. I first remember that
we had to go to the well and carry water.
Because we didn’t always have water
in our houses, you know. Then when the coal
mining, the coal company [came], they put
up an old fashioned pump. The
hand pumps. Yeah . . . about every six houses,
they put a pump. So we still had to carry
water. I remember buckets of water we had
to carry especially on wash days.Monday:
Wash Day and Bread DayMonday was wash day and bread day. My Momma made
bread. She’d make bread that would
last the whole week. We’d wash clothes
and bake. And I remember we’d come
home from school and had to finish the washing
cause we didn’t always have washing
machines. We had the oppression [?] -- the rub
board.I
thank God for my raising. It has made me
appreciate life so much. I can really appreciate
things you know now because I knew the hard
time. But everybody did their washing like
that, you’d see a line clothes line because everybody had
to put your clothes outside because you
didn’t have a dryer.So
you’d walk down the community and this
row of houses and almost everybody washed
Monday and you’d see just lines and
lines of clothes and things were pretty
and white. I remember the clothes were so
white the sun would sparkle on them, you
know, cause you’d wash twice and rinsed
twice.All day, you was washing all day, and we came
from school. Because what my mom didn’t
do, we got a chance to do. I remember when
my dad bought our washing machine he said,
“My God she’d about wash herself
to death.” Because we finally got a
washer. Everyday the washing machine was
up until we got use to it. Pursglove
#2Pursglove
number two that’s where we lived. Pursglove
two and over on the other hill was Pursglove
number eight. They was all owned by the
same man, but the little community like
a little nest of houses maybe about fifty
families. Maybe a little bit more than that,
maybe a little less. But that was called
Pursglove number two and then over on the
other hill there was one called Pursglove
number eight. And they had their own little
school building and their own little church
and that’s how it was.Soup
Lines and the WPAI
remember vaguely the soup lines right here
in Osage. I remember when the WPA was first
started and I must’ve been about eight
years old maybe when all that started WPA
then they had just a soup line. A place
in Osage made big meals and you just stand
in line and went and got the food. You had
a hot lunch.Quakers I remember, and this was when I was in grade
school, maybe second, third, fourth grade.
But I remember the Quakers came here. There’s
a building up the road about two miles called
the Shack, have you heard anything about
the Shack?There
was a shack and they came together and sponsored
a hot lunch program for the kids from all
the schools. Okay all the schools in these
communities like Pursglove, over Pursglove
number eight whatever. The Quakers did that --
they sponsored a hot lunch program and the
moms would come and cook everyday and so
the kids everyday at lunch time we had a
good hot meal, a good hot lunch.They
had certain days each mom cooked, certain
days have three or four moms cook Monday,
three or four moms cooked Tuesday. I remember
those meals were good. We always had fruit
and sometimes you didn’t get fruit
at home you know, but they always had fruit.
Always gave you a real nourishing meal,
a hot bowl of soup and some crackers or
peanut butter on nice brown thick bread
and jelly.Everyday
LifeMy
brother-in-law had a car and we just thought
it was just great if we could just ride
from Pursglove to Osage. That was just the
greatest cause we walked everywhere. Bus
fare was just about a nickel, I think. I
remember candy bars were two cents. We use
to sell pop bottles to get money to buy
some pop, you know, candy, something sweet
that we craved. But
relations were real good. Everybody knew
everybody. And if anybody got sick, people
call midwives. I didn’t call them that -- just
mothers that knew anything if anybody got
sick, like pneumonia or something, they
knew what to conjure up. All kinds of saps
and oils.Home
RemediesYeah,
I wish I remember that stuff that my mom
knew because you didn’t go to doctor
all the time. First off you couldn’t
afford it, and then they had one company
doctor. One thing, the coal mines would
provide a doctor for all, and so you needed
the doctor when he was somewhere else. Mrs.
Williams needed him, or the boys needed
a doctor? Well he was over at Pursglove
number eight so you couldn’t always
get a doctor and so, but they knew what
to use. You had whooping cough with pneumonia
or whatever and it worked. And all kinds
of teas and roots and herbs.We kept stuff all the time. My mother kept
sassafras tea and she kept all kind of roots.
I can’t remember all the stuff that
she did have. And when you got something,
she just knew what to make. And I remember
she made homemade cough syrup. This was
good, now. She would take a whole lemon
and cut it up the peel and all, and she
would take onions and cut that up in there,
and then she would take honey if she could -- or
even sugar, and put that in the oven and
let that bake, and it came a real thick
syrup. And that’s what she gave you
for cough. That lemon did it and that onion.
It didn’t taste very good, but it did
the job.Osage
and the Company Store Osage, my goodness, it was a business town -- had
two department stores, I think. I forget
how many. We had an A and P here and I don’t
know how many grocery stores and a company
store. Let me tell you what a company store
is.Okay.
A company store, it’s owned by the
man who owned the coal mines. Okay. They
would have a great big store and they had
almost everything in the store and what
they didn’t have in the store you could
get. Then what they did, like you go to
the company store, okay, just like you go
to a market and shop, that’s what they
had, but you had credit from the company.
So my dad never had any money and I’ll
tell you why: because our store bill was
always bigger than the money that he made,
so he was always in the hole as they use
to call it. There was a lot of families
like that, you know. Your store bill was
more than you worked cause there was a big
family of us. Everybody wasn’t like
that. Some people just didn’t use the
company store at all. They just went to
stores in Osage. Oh yes, you could, but
not till we got old and began to get after-school
jobs and things, and we could, you know,
help out.FamilyThere
was nine of us in the house, seven kids
and dad and mom made nine of us and we lived
in a four-room house. All the houses were
four rooms. And you made and you just lived
good. I don’t know how you did it.
Now we couldn’t do it. I’m telling
you I look back now and wonder, but we had
two bedrooms upstairs and one for the boys
and one for the girls cause you had two
big beds in every room. And everybody had
the same thing. You had two big beds and
girls slept over here some at the top, some
at the bottom -- you put two up to the top
and two down to the bottom. Think about
that, but it was fun. It was fun, it really
was, and we had a little heater in our room.
You had little coal stoves everywhere and
you kept the room warm.After
we got bigger where we could get real jobs
and my brothers carried the newspapers,
we was able to help out at home and you
really didn’t mind doing that because
you saw the sacrifice that mom and dad made
for you. We bought linoleums and I bought
my mom a rocking chair and my sister bought
my mother a rocking chair. She always wanted
one. Like I said, we got linoleums on the
floors and curtains and pretty bedspreads.
After we got bigger and then my dad began
to have some money, you know, we went to
school. I had one sister that went to college.
We went away. I went to Washington to work
and so the family dribbled down to just
two, my baby brother and baby sister, so
then there was money.SwimmingAnd
oh my goodness. . . . I remember the swimming
pool, when you first got the swimming pool
in the area. The coal miners got together
and had a swimming pool made, built up at
the Shack. Oh it was fun. We didn’t
have a swimming pool cause you could go
to the river, you know. When the kids wanted
to swim, they’d go to the river to
swim because we didn’t have anywhere
to swim, but when the coal miners got together
and had a swimming pool built (it’s
up at the Shack and it’s still there
the swimming pool is) that’s when we
got a chance to go to the swimming pool.
Or
you could find a little creek and dam it
up and swim in that, but that was muddy
water and you didn’t know what was
in it, you know. Oh God, I remember my brother-in-law
threw me in one time, one of these muddy
rivers, muddy ponds, just stopped it up,
and it scared me to death, I tell you what,
cause you don’t know what’s in
mud. You don’t know whether you ‘re
going to run into snakes or whatever. But
you know, I didn’t get in there no
more. I said. "I’ll never do that
again!"

Interview with anonymous former Scott's Run mining community resident by Kirk Hazen, in Scott's Run Voices, from Scott's Run Writing Heritage Project. West Virginia History, Volume 53, 1994

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Outdoor privy. Scene taken from the main
highway. The stream is Scott's Run. This privy is typical of many
improvised outdoor toilets on Scott's Run. It is made from an old
automobile; the house at left is also improvised by the family who
occupy it. A stream of water flows past the privy into Scott's Run: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. The Shack Community Center. Scene is
typical of crowded space. In center of valley the stream is Scott's
Run Creek. The Shack is a community center sponsored by a religious
organization: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. The Patch. One of the worst camps in
Scott's Run. The stream is an auxiliary branch that flows into Scott's
Run. The main valley of Scott's Run can be seen towards the right of
this picture. These houses were originally built as single bachelor
apartments; there are from six to eight separate housekeeping units in
the buildings. Many of them are now occupied by families living in one
room: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

x Scott's Run, West Virginia. The Patch. One of the worst camps in
Scott's Run. The stream is an auxiliary branch that flows into Scott's
Run can be seen towards the right of this picture. These houses were
originally built as single bachelor apartments; there are from six to
eight separate housekeeping units in the buildings. Many of them are
now occupied by families living in one room: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Jere, mine tipple. Mine bankrupt and
closed since December 1936. The camp of this mine is considered a
stranded community: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Troop Hill -- an abandoned coal camp on
Scott's Run, West Virginia, December 22, 1936. Mine closed early in
1936. Scene taken from main highway entering Scott's Run, March 1937: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Chaplin Hill. This scene is typical of
many camps built near the mine. In the background can be seen several
of the government sanitary privies. These houses are multiple
dwellings which accommodate several families. It is one of the few
camps on Scott's Run which affords space for hogs and garden: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1936 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Chaplin Hill Mine Tipple. This mine as
bankrupt and closed during the summer of 1936. The company was
reorganized and began to operate under new management in November
1936: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, 1936 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Cassville, mine tipple. This mine is
operating and supplies work for three separate camps (Cassville, New
Hill, and the Patch). To the left of picture is shown one of the
government privies built by WPA workers in a sanitation campaign
organized to eliminate the old typical filthy mine camp toilets: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Pursglove No. 2. Scene taken from main
highway shows company store and typical hillside camp: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Pursglove Mines Nos. 4 and 5. Scene
taken from main highway shows typical hillside settlements. Houses
shown are for supervisory staff. Camp one of the best on Scott's Run: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Pursglove Mines Nos. 3 and 4. This is
the largest company of Scott's Run. Scene shows main Scott's Run
Highway and atmosphere loaded with coal dust and typical of Scott's
Run on any working day: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. Another view of Pursglove Mines Nos. 3 and 4: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

Scott's Run, West Virginia. This building is a part of the abandoned
mine buildings of the stranded camp of Jere. It is the exterior of the
old fan house. The children are a part of a WPA nursery now
functioning in the camp: photo by Lewis Wickes Hine, March 1937 (US National Archives)

9 comments:

Quite extraordinary, Tom. I've spent too many years up to my neck in fancy stuff about the shiftiness of representation - documentary, history, realism, verisimilitude blah blah - but these words and images feel like the plain straight truth of things. No arguing with those faces, that improvised privy, the cow, or the corner you had to get around before you lit the fuse. A whole hard world in every detail. Overwhelming.

I think the last comment I made at your place will be the same as this: This is why my grandfather, the teacher in town, was forced to leave West Virginia -- leaving my mom and grandmother behind -- and head to Detroit where he slept in the public parks until securing a job at the Briggs factory.

Sometimes there's a rip in the curtain and the circus of representation parts its veils to allow us to see something like reality.

The photographers who took most of these pictures were being paid a standard wage of $5 per day, plus basic-minimal "expenses". Principle appears to have been a common source of persistence in what was often challenging labour.

The miners weren't exactly getting rich either, and their lives were continually at risk, as they did their brutal work, when work was to be had -- certainly not out of principle, unless it be the principle of survival for themselves and their families.

"Surface rights" to the hilly rural lands of this part of West Virginia, above a particularly rich coal seam, shrewdly purchased for a speculative song, gave the coal companies "legal right" to "undermine"; and they undermined, and they undermined... until they were gone, and the coal and large sections of the hillsides exhausted.

It's been interesting to me to see how the same porous hollow has been lit with differing shades of historical meaning, each feeling equally "true", by each of the photographers who ventured there.

Marion Post Wolcott captures a close sense of the human scale, Lewis Hine a larger historical picture, situating the eye within the bleak industrial landscape.

Ben Shahn's photography like his painting has consistently a political motive. It's fascinating to see the uses the former came to serve him in the latter.

Here we seem to have looped back to the theme of representation. People will have noticed how carefully Shahn's Scott's Run painting follows his FSA photo (seen just under the first oral history text).

One curious omission: the figure of the striking miner at left is using a cigarette holder in the photo, but in the painting, the corresponding figure is not. Shahn's attention to detail make that a bit of a puzzler. My guess is that he probably saw the cigarette holder as an affectation, a class-marked if not also gender-marked appurtenance. At the time, cigarette holders were used mostly by women smoking in public. At the House Un-American Activities Committee hearings of 1947 -- as a result of which her husband the novelist and screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, uncooperative with the questioners, would go to prison for eleven months then be blacklisted -- Cleo Fincher Trumbo can be seen using a cigarette holder.

Cleo's health doesn't seem to have been harmed, by the way. She passed away in Los Altos just four years ago, age 93.

I admire her longevity. This post has been five and half years in the making and might well have taken forever, but wanted to wrestle it up here before the flickering carbide lamp goes out.

This is an extraordinary, beautiful post, Tom. (We’ve been on the road for some days now, and I’m just catching up, on-line.) The way of life depicted here has changed only in the (mostly) superficial and technical details. The exploitation remains the same. Not just the towns and people die, as a result, but the ecology too.

Many thanks for this one and for the love and care that went into it—a long time coming, as you say. And thanks to the great FSA photographers and Kirk Hazen for preserving some of it.

Posts like these are works of art. This whole blog is a tremendous unfolding work of art, and those take time. This seems a good opportunity to say out loud how much the work and the imagination and the time and the talent that goes in to it all, time after time, is appreciated. Thanks Tom.

Vassilis, it was not just the time but the anachronistic believing in something, perhaps having to do with that howling ironic misnomer.

Coal mining, corporate exploitation of the land, and widespread impoverishment did not vanish from the rural hollows of West Virginia once the Scott's Run holes closed down. Technology ensured there would eventually be both new methods of rapacious violation (think: "mountaintop removal") and fewer jobs.

Two US Presidents have paid attention to West Virginia. The first was FDR, during the 1930s. The second was JFK, who visited West Virginia in the run-up to the 1960 Presidential election. It was an eye-opener for him. He'd never seen that kind of human want in the United States. His bewildered comment: "Imagine... just imagine kids who never drink milk."He took that sobering experience into the campaign.

"This is a great country, but I think it could be a greater country; and this is a powerful country, but I think it could be a more powerful country... I'm not satisfied when we have over nine billion dollars worth of food - some of it rotting - even though there is a hungry world, and even though four million Americans wait every month for a food package from the government, which averages five cents a day per individual. I saw cases in West Virginia, here in the United States, where children took home part of their school lunch in order to feed their families because I don't think we're meeting our obligations toward these Americans."

"Once he had been sworn in as the President of the United States, Kennedy's first Executive Order was to expand the federal food distribution program for needy families and he had his newly minted Secretary of Agriculture Orville Freeman go down to Welch, WV and hand out the first $95 in food stamps in our nation's history to an unemployed miner trying to support 13 children. And, on the occasion of West Virginia's centennial celebration in the summer of 1963, President Kennedy came back to the state capital in Charleston and, just days before he would give his historic Ich Bin Ein Berliner speech, told the gathered crowd that he saluted and joined the people of West Virginia and would, 'carry on...to Europe the proud realization that not only mountaineers, but also Americans, are always free.'”

Very thoughtful of Hazen, who's a veteran hand at folkloric revival himself, to include the transcriber in his list of the people whose faithful documentation makes it possible for us to revisit this history -- and thoughtless of me not to have named her.